I’m a big fan of “sparse bundle” disk images in Mac OS X. They allow me to create encrypted repositories for valuable data that can efficiently be rsync-ed between disks and don’t waste a lot of space. So I thought I’d write up a bit on what they are and how they can be used.

Although I appreciate Apple’s decision to go all-SSD on the MacBook line, it does cause some problems capacity-wise. Even 256 GB is an expensive proposition from Apple, and it’s not easy or cheap to expand storage on these laptops. One option is a fast USB 3 drive like the SanDisk Extreme, and there’s also some external Thunderbolt […]

I’ve had terrible issues with Mac OS X never completing Spotlight indexing and Time Machine backups. I was pulling out my hair until I decided to check the console log. That’s when I saw this: Thousands of mdworker errors, with a dozen appearing every second. What could it mean?

I am lucky enough to have received a Nifty MiniDrive for my Retina MacBook Pro, and am in process of putting it through its paces with a SanDisk 64 GB SDXC card. One of the first concerns I had is the steal-ability of such a small, valuable, content-rich item. So I decided to protect it using Mac OS X’s FIleVault 2 full-disk encryption technology. Here’s a step-by-step guide and my post-encryption thoughts!

The CompactFlash Association announced a new media card format last month, and now Sony and Nikon have introduced the first media and digital cameras, respectively. But what exactly is an XQD memory card? Read on for the details.

This week I started getting to know a whole bunch of wireless geeks in preparation for Wireless Field Day in March. I also wrote about Light Peak, my search for an AirPrint-compatible printer, and some more on the iPad. On the enterprise IT side, I covered Application Performance Monitoring (with a special offer from SolarWinds) and Dell’s potential acquisition of Compellent.

After Apple added SDXC and ExFAT compatibility to Mac OS X in 10.6.5, I got to wondering if they had added similar compatibility to the iPad in iOS 4.2.1. Although the hardware reader is probably not SDXC-capable, it wouldn’t have been too hard to add the ExFAT driver from Mac OS X to iOS. Then, the iPad could import from SD cards formatted as ExFAT and USB-connected cameras.

SDXC and its partner, exFAT, are on the rise and gaining support in the latest digital cameras. New Sony models like my NEX-5 add SDXC support, as do new models from Canon, Nikon, and others. Photographers are mainly interested in the increased speed and capacity of these cards, but many will face a challenge when trying to use them in their Macintosh computers. Thankfully, it looks like Apple is moving just as rapidly to support SDXC and exFAT!

Microsoft already gave the world FAT and NTFS, and both have become common in the non-Windows world thanks to flash drives, SD cards, and portable disks. But the folks from Redmond are now introducing a new filesystem, exFAT. Do we really need a new filesystem?

An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.

Jef Raskin

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